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rfmcdonaldThe recent fatal shooting of a teenage boy, Keegan Allen, at a talent contest held at the Hungarian-Canadian Cultural Centre near Bathurst and St. Clair streets, in midtown Toronto prompted an interesting article in The Globe and Mail about the HCCC's history (Peter Cheney's "On St. Clair West, an echo in the hall"). The Hungarian-Canadian community, as The Canadian Encyclopedia observes, is of relatively recent vintage.
This last migration, as Cheney writes, is the migration that produced the HCCC and kept it a vibrant organization for decades after its founding, only to start to falter as the Hungarian-Canadians became an increasingly suburbanized population and as the assimilation of younger generations began.
With the slow evaporation of most of the HCCC's local user base, and the changing ethnic composition of the neighbourhood, the HCCC opened its facilities to non-Hungarian users. Some anonymous Hungarian-Canadians quoted in the article have questioned the sense of this in the aftermath of the shooting, but in the absence of a strong local Hungarian-Canadian community it's open to question whether the HCCC would be economically viable.
Hungarians came to Canada in 4 major waves. In the period before 1914 about 8000 immigrated; from 1925 to 1930 about 26 000; between 1948 and 1952 some 12 000 postwar displaced persons arrived; and between 1956 and 1957 about 37 000 Hungarian refugees came to Canada after the collapse of the 1956 uprising against Soviet authority. Since then several hundred Hungarians have immigrated to Canada annually.
Most of the pre-1914 settlers were peasants; in general they were disappointed transmigrants from the industrial slums of the US. The interwar arrivals were a somewhat more mixed lot socially, while many of the post-WWII immigrants were from Hungary's dispossessed middle and upper classes. Young adult males predominated in all but the last wave of immigrants.
This last migration, as Cheney writes, is the migration that produced the HCCC and kept it a vibrant organization for decades after its founding, only to start to falter as the Hungarian-Canadians became an increasingly suburbanized population and as the assimilation of younger generations began.
Set on St. Clair Avenue near Oakwood, the Hungarian-Canadian Cultural Centre is an elegant shrine to a lifestyle that has its roots in the late 1950s, when more than 30,000 Hungarians arrived in Canada after fleeing their homeland in the wake of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. About 10,000 came to Toronto, which soon had the country's most active Hungarian community.
A Hungarian club on College Street near Bathurst rapidly developed into a little Budapest. There was a bar, a dining room that served traditional Hungarian dishes, folk dancing and card games. By the 1970s, the club was bursting at the seams and flush with money. In 1978, it bought the building (a former synagogue) on St. Clair for about $500,000.
Over the next decade or so, HCCC boomed. The club added a 25,000-book Hungarian library, a wood-panelled dining room and a Hungarian-language school. There were posters of the old country and portraits of Hungarian heroes like composer Franz Liszt. The club was busy most nights. In the Arpad Hall, a giant Crown of St. Stephen was hung from the ceiling, a glittering symbol of Hungarian pride.
By the 1990s, demographic shifts had eroded the club's membership. Rising housing costs drove many younger Hungarians to the Toronto suburbs, and the children of the original émigrés were (in most cases) less interested in the old country and its traditions than their parents were.
With the slow evaporation of most of the HCCC's local user base, and the changing ethnic composition of the neighbourhood, the HCCC opened its facilities to non-Hungarian users. Some anonymous Hungarian-Canadians quoted in the article have questioned the sense of this in the aftermath of the shooting, but in the absence of a strong local Hungarian-Canadian community it's open to question whether the HCCC would be economically viable.
